


Event Flags

by spiralSeeker



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 14:58:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiralSeeker/pseuds/spiralSeeker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am going to mostly trust the interesting tagging system for fics here...</p><p>Sollux going through the motions of A5 forwards. Kind of introspective, loosely follows canon, and autor takes some liberties.</p><p>Hope you like it!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Event Flags

The only reason Eridan misses the first shot is because of your fucking voices.  
Fuckers probably want to get you personally and not by proxy. Plus, Ampora would be the shittiest proxy ever- at least Karkat would make sure you went down close and bloody and brain dead by rom-coms.  
But you heard the voices, heard one amusingly like yours and had the sense to kind of sort of not accidentally trip over something and dodge the white beam as thick as both your arms. You can’t dodge the dirt though, and your face had a brief red affair with ground the slimy consistency of melting brain. Great. Marginally better than esoterically phallic beam through your chest.  
From roughly the same position, you blast off a text at Eridan. And flip a double bird at the impeccably shitty camera, because fuck him and his Whateverab’s crosshairs. Let him enjoy the image in his eyeglass-computer.  
You totally didn’t count on him cursing loud enough for you to find him again. Must’ve thought the shot took you down- and why shouldn’t it have done so anyways- and so far you haven’t heard much of texting dead.  
You think Aradia doesn’t count. It hurts to think about her too much- you have twice the personalities and she has somewhere around zero, even if you wouldn’t wish either of your self-hating selves on anybody else- but she isn’t dead. She is a robot, she was a sprite (different from an outright corpse or a zombie) and before that she was an average rustblooded girl. Then again, you also thought Eridan wasn’t this much of a douche yet, so you aren’t the authority on this.  
You pick yourself up from the ground, remembering to keep yourself down at the insistent behest of a doomed-voice you (and fuck it, you’re not becoming part of them yet) and take a circuitous route to Eridan, guiding yourself by the loud fucking curses and the lens flare of a small sniper scope attachment. Plus side to him shooting white lasers at you is that they make for wicked tracking lights.  
And when you get there, you don’t exactly waste time with a one-liner. There will be time to pull your bi-colored shades down looking awesome once the fucker is knocked out on slimy brain goo warmer than an overworked computer.  
You just blast away with a couple psionic beams, and that’s that.  
\---  
twinArmaggedons began pestering cuttlefishCuller  
TA: ff come pick up your fucka22 of a moiiraiil  
TA: lobaf, ju2t 2outh of the riing of fiire  
TA: can’t mii22 iit, braiins look liike 2queakbea2t treat2  
TA: he2 aliive iif you care. not takiing care of bodiie2 iin my land  
twinArmaggedons ceased pestering cuttlefishCuller  
\---  
You didn’t exactly bother with being that nice to Feferi over chat. It was more of a reflex reaction to ‘get this fucker the fuck out of here’, and had you had the time to think it through without the normal troll territorial instincts, you maybe would’ve been less dry.  
And you wouldn’t have dropped the moirail bomb again on Feferi. Not that she looks really concerned about that, she’s impressively cool with being down a quadrant, but still. Once upon a time, Aradia nearly chewed all four of your horns off for daring to disrespect an ex-moirail of hers in a not-joking manner. Feferi just slings Eridan’s fainted ass over a shoulder, her two pronged trident over the other one and asks what you nailed him with.  
Says she hasn’t seen him like this since, oh, when he tried to bring down a lusus about that big (points at a brain hill with her trident) and he was like, three sweeps. Bad idea, and she only got to him because he had a death grip on his rifle. And a smile on his face, since the fucker did manage to take that thing down with his (more) gogawful arsenal and Feferi got to feed her lusus anyways.  
“Missing the smile though. What, did you not go out all ‘duel’? Sol, you shouldn’t have done that, it’s a sea dweller thing… but oh, I’m glad you’re okay!” She chirps and glubs in your direction, walking easily towards the gate that took her here. Every so often, she checks on the body she’s carrying, pap pap pap on his back as if to reassure him of his continued existence (and epic fail), and keeps on.  
“And thanks. Again, you know. You’re really good at keeping the peace when you want to! Been more useful than getting ranted at via memo-“ some chuckled glubs which you echo back, because seriously Karkat getting all uppity via memo isn’t your idea of a good time either, even if you’re sufficiently pale for the guy to see he’s not being as much of a douche as he could be- “and you probably get some of the needed echeladder rungs for that too. “  
You’re not sure if she’s praising you or slipping in some condescension. Probably a bit of both, but you don’t really mind that much. She asks about some stuff- how are you doing, did you really take no damage; she’d like to try out this Life spell, maybe we could team up. You mindlessly agree, although hell if you’ve seen a Witch fight. And at this, she drops her trident back into her specibi card and gives you a mighty one-armed hug. You think that if someone nailed Equius with a strong enough temporal weakening spell, Feferi would give him a run for his money in the strength department.  
“That shore is great! I think we’ll be great, just you see!” And she’s off, dragging you along for the ride to her sea-glass land.  
\---  
The change is immediate. The whole world is much cooler than yours, and about as humid as an ocean must be if he made it air. You reckon it was fitted more to her needs than any average world, or she is born luckier than most. Well, she is already tyrian-blooded, there isn’t much luckier out there.  
And the dynamic change is immediate too. A quick drop by her hive to leave a still mostly passed out Eridan in a couch by the entrance and pick you up some drinks (I’ve heard psionics are prone to headaches Sol, and I wouldn’t want to you work yourself too hard!) and you’re off to fight some random mobs out and around. Nothing you haven’t done already in your own land, although hers looks like it does benefit from getting the more vicious denizens culled-  
“Not culled Sol! I’m trying to redefine it!”  
“Okay Fef, killed. Sounds much better believe me-“ A grin splits her face almost literally, she really is enjoying the slight sarcasm.  
“That’s the spirit! Now let’s go make sure these don’t hurt my cuttles, poor dears can’t even build a thing without my help!” And she’s off, sprinting after some huge thing that looks like it’s- oh shit- “Fuck it Fef don’t dodge the step at the last fucking moment!”  
\---  
When you end up half-whole-assedly helping her reign her scatterbrained cuttlefish consorts, you get to know Feferi. Fun activity, and if nothing else you commend Eridan on actually managing to pick a good companion. Moirail. Whatever, she’s… free now?  
Fuck it, you’re not even going down that road again. Mind honey and a cobalt girl got you once, shame on them and you. Not getting you twice. But it’s nice, getting to linger with her on a glassy shore, her hair entangling both of you. She’ll have her backhanded saccharine and you’ll jest a little, about how she does sound like a ruler. You’ll have one of your other moods, and she’ll liven you up. It’s functional, it’s not Karkat screaming and it’s soft like the drone of buzzing bees and waves.  
Well, half of you does want to follow through. You’re not going pale or flushed yet. You’re just there, teasing Feferi without that much anger to your voice and maybe, you’re stroking her hair. Definitely are. Ear fins too, since she giggles a whole fucking lot when you do that and it’s… quite nice sounding.  
“Haven’t been like this in a long, long time.”  
“What, middle of nowhere society isn’t as lively as I thought?”  
She lightly smacks your hand, mock annoyed and you bow your head. Press lips to her forehead- not the hair, hers tastes like seaweed and salt- and there goes the expression.  
“Oh look Sol, you actually can smile.”  
“Haven’t been like this in…”  
Okay, it’s barely a day, but you mean the whole thing. And by the look Feferi gives you, maybe she caught on to your second meaning too.  
\---  
Now you’re on a meteor and you seriously regret complaining about the humidity of Feferi’s land. Or the suffocating heat in yours. Or anything really- the meteor is metal-grey and not really there as far as climatic conditions are concerned. Can’t call it hot, cold, dry, humid, anything other than cramped. And full to the fucking brim of computer illiterates and fucknooks and a honking mess and a robo girl and the scent of tea and chalk.  
At least once you fix Trollian up and threaten bodily (psionic) harm to the systems everyone’s using, they all leave you the fuck alone.  
Except, well, the fact that you all occupy the same sort of common room. Most of the fucking time. But you don’t have to deal with their fuckery most of the time, and so far only three people have decided that you aren’t going to zap them all the way to the burning carcass of Prospit.  
Aradia- like fuck you’re calling her ‘bot’, she was there for the length of your session in her detached and spiritually absent manner- for some reason favors your company. Maybe because you’re better suited to being her tech support than Equius is, as far as software goes. Or because being corporeal lets her phase some of her memories better to current times. Or who knows why, you just like having her metallic form sitting next to you, a low functional hum emitting itself right into your ribs and blinking red eyes that match one of yours.  
She’s getting more conversational now, occasionally piping up with some dry comment or her standardized ‘I’m okay with that’. And if you had to guess, you’d say it wasn’t your doing- you’re content with just the quiet and the noise of Somebody Else’s Problem on the background- but you probably could point a finger at the culprit. If Aradia is not currently occupying one of your sides, Feferi is there. Sometimes, they share you, and it’s weird to you how both are hard coldness under your fingers. And Feferi sounds like waves of speech and fish puns, some of them swimming around your brain. Aradia doesn’t do them- says she doesn’t know much about fish besides the long names scientists used and those don’t pun well- but at times you do. Aradia is brutally honest and says they suck as much as you expected them too. Feferi ‘glubs’ and usually follows up with a hug or two.  
Sometimes, she tries to knock Aradia out of neutrality. Sometimes there’s a three-way row over your keyboard and it ends with the two female parties taking different transportalizers and a rigorously split schedules. And sometimes, the three of you fall asleep over some computer.  
Karkat wakes you the fuck up, saying that he gave the fucking order that no fucking one goes to fucking sleep and that includes the fucking Aradia fucking bot. He might have the record on the most gratuitous use of profanity, you think as you yawn. But you get his point, saw Kanaya’s reaction as she suddenly got a blacked out screen. Terezi was yelling that she smelled grub sauce, the fresh one, for hours. Horrorterrors or something and anyone with a dream self in Prospit can’t fall asleep. And the Dersite’s can’t either, because of solidarity or some shit about whoever blew the yellow moon up still being at large. Unsurprisingly, he cares, vaguely rom-com pale for the whole ragtag bunch of nooknuggets.  
Takes a leader.  
When he’s not ranting- close to never- he speaks to you. You were bros, and at least he’s abandoned coding. About what you talk, half your brain doesn’t know and the other half straight up doesn’t care. It’s something to kill time with until your doom, and talking with Karkat is better than most other things, a certain rust-blood/blue-blood and the heiress excluded, same as chilling on your trusty computer.  
Except, that is, when he decides out of nowhere that you’re getting sorted out.  
\---  
Feferi interprets those orders in a really weird manner. Karkat probably meant it in the way ‘Sollux will revoke his ban on using him as tech support’, but the tyrian girl sees it as:  
“Sol, we’ll talk about your feelings”, with an odd emphasis on the ‘eel’ because that pun is a bit too subtle for her liking.  
Aradia won’t bail you out. She’s okay with either possibility, even if she watches the show with mild interest while it happens. She does stop Feferi from dragging you to sit on the fucking horn pile, because you can’t fix her up with your fingers Faygo-sticky and it makes a racket loud enough to make Karkat rant at you for longer than Feferi will.  
\---  
You take Feferi up on her offer exactly once consciously.  
“Exploded.”  
You aren’t in the horn pile- fuck it, you’re in her room because yours is a doubly post-apocalyptic mess- and somehow you’re curled on top of a large chest that rests against a window, looking out. There’s only empty space out there, fitting for the Furthest Ring. She said her dream self was out there once upon a time before she too lost connection, and once you spent time and wasting eyesight trying to find a ghostly figure dressed in Dersite violet.  
Now, you just sit and blankly stare out as she shooshes you and strokes between your left pair of horns. Her other arm is around your waist, and the rest of her is somewhat uncomfortably stretched out over you, legs braced on the floor. Feferi doesn’t mind, and listens as you just speak.  
At times, there’s one of her saccharine stingers thrown in, you’re not sure if intentionally or not, and you tap at her fingers busy in your hair. It’s as close to thank you as you’re getting.  
\---  
The second time you took Feferi up on her offer to sit on the horn pile and have a blood pusher to blood pusher conversation, you had an observer. And about one of Nepeta’s kettles of tea- Feferi had the brilliant idea and the feline girl really couldn’t oppose herself to sharing a brew or two to help in matters of the heart.  
Not for the whole time. And actually, it was three- Kanaya asking you to be her alibis for the whole Matriorb thing, Karkat bugging you about the Kanaya thing, and Eridan.  
One of them is definitely not like the fucking others. At least, the first two had the decency to leave soon when you not-so-kindly asked for it. The last one spends some time staring before striding with an affection of pride towards you.  
Did Eridan always have this much of a gun barrel up his nook or something?  
Fuck that. You instantly shut the fuck up- thing which Feferi immediately notices and dislikes- and try on your most platonically poisonous glare. Amp it up to the double.  
It doesn’t fly over Eridan, which amuses you. Some oblique comments later and he’s near frothing at the mouth at you, fangs bared and ear fins raised in what would be menacing if you didn’t know the trick with Feferi’s and emotions.  
Then he cuts you off and makes an offer.  
Surrender.  
Feferi phrases it better than any hit to the jaw of yours could. She just cuts him off, icy fury similar to the ocean’s and eyes deadly serious.  
His take the same tone. Something about not wanting her to die- not like anything he does can really guarantee she’ll live, on Alternia she still has to fight the Condesce- something about ‘please trust me’, ‘please follow me’.  
A fish pun. Dude just dug his own grave (neat human concept, you think Aradia would’ve liked to hear about it). Feferi swears. It blows your mind, and it suddenly goes double.  
A voice in your head. Hers. Pleading, apologetic and with a hollow quality. Hers.  
It wasn’t there before Eridan. Not with the clarity that means it’s impending and meant to be avoided at any costs.  
So you stand, and offer him a rematch. Formal, like she asked you to way before this clusterfuck happened, although like fuck you mean any of the caliginous undertones. You mean for him to fucking bite it hard.  
No steps are taken backwards. You just shrug yourself out of the horn pile, a few loose horns honking in a manner that fails to be ominous. You just stare levelly at Eridan, half demanding him to pick a fucking weapon and half eviscerating him mentally already.  
\---  
Something about psionic energy: it’s a fucking light show. And it also is powered by your own body. Plus side, no psionics are ever fat. Your own internal generator burns it away into a powering radiance and deadly laser beams. Minus side, your life expectancy is about as low as Tavros’s or Aradia’s was. You could easily burn out, bleed through your ears and cry thick ochre-gold and die with your finger on the psychic trigger.  
Then again, you’re Doom. Not incarnate, because fuck God Tiers you’re above suicide for shits and giggles (last time you did it sucked even if you had a fair damsel waking you the fuck up with a kiss) and like fuck you’re going all Doom powered. Glitched as fuck Aspect, kills you as easily as it gives you boons.  
But this time, when you’re offered the potential you take it. You rush headfirst into your own limits, drawing on sacrifice and a rich desire to kick Eridan’s ass into the fucking meteor’s core and through the other fucking side.  
Something about Hope-aspect energy. There is quite literally nothing it really can’t do, if one wishes on a result hard enough. And trusts whatever one is given to do that.  
Anyone- you included- would trust most (everything except frogs) things Kanaya gave you. Such as a fucking weapon which, for convenience sake’s, she even renamed to fit the personality of the douche who’d wield it. It was practically giving him an ace in the hole, you realize, and maybe that’s the reason you can faintly hear Kanaya’s deep voice in your head.  
And if someone had a definite want to kick your skinny ass through the meteor… well, asides from yourself, Eridan takes the cake, all bundled up in pretty fuchsia and saccharine.  
\---  
She leaps into the fray once that you see.  
Feferi tries to push you apart, a hand on both your chests and eyes wild. Then it’s with both ends of her trident and then both of you tacitly move out of her range. Eridan gives you the breath that allows you to push her beyond the range of fire and then he draws.  
Lucky you, you don’t need to waste motion that superfluously.  
You just power your eyebeams up.  
\---  
Some thrilling red-blue-white seconds later, you black out.  
\---  
You’ve been dead already, so you know this isn’t it. Aradia isn’t calling out ‘Sollux what are you doing here’ like she did last time. Karkat isn’t pestering you on your dead chat client either.  
It’s just blackness and silence and your mouth feeling weird, like someone shoved little pebbles inside. Your eyes (eye sockets) are slick with blood, and beyond the layer of liquid dripping down your ears you hear a soothing background noise.  
More like rasping screams and hushed movements and ‘Sollux wake the fuck up’ becoming a mindless mantra inside your head.  
\---  
You aren’t sure when you wake the fuck up again, but you aren’t in the common room. And Karkat isn’t there, if it was him(you guess that must’ve been him, Kanaya doesn’t swear and both Terezi and Nepeta are too small to lift you from where you were slumped and like fuck any of the others would’ve done something like that). You power up your psionics again- low power, just enough to give you a faint film of static on your limbs and body- and try to see.  
Your entire world is hued in red and blue and grey. And you can see at most five steps in front of you, if you consider grainy and discolored as valid sight. Good enough to get you back to the control room- you have to check on your opponent, since you missed the end result. You expect a bloody mess.  
That’s what you get.  
There’s a slender body resting on the horn pile. A hand has a slack grip on…  
Oh fuck  
Fuck  
A trident. You can’t run worth shit but you can sort of stagger fast and trip and reach the horn pile where there’s a dead girl. No sign, but you can guess at the color from her features. Long silky hair still smelling of sea weed, goggles reflecting the psionic light in dancing colors and necklaces split by a fine science (magic, like fuck you’re using Eridan’s terminology) beam. Trails of blood, and if you apply yourself- fuck, not to the point of getting this dizzy, just a bit less- you can see it’s a different color near her mouth. Whatever you did, you nailed Eridan with at least a good hit. There’s nothing else from him though apart from a traitor flushed mark close to her lips and at the borders of the gaping wound on the chest and you’d curse, you would, but not now.  
Your computer’s dead and you can’t really get to wherever Karkat is, but you can get yourself back to where you were as he does whatever he’s doing (probably another memo, they’re always there when there’s shit hitting the fan and he’s being inappropriately uncool about it).  
You do so, and follow him through with whatever it is he wants to do to save the remaining people’s skin.  
But you do it blind.  
\---  
When you reach the outskirts of the Green Sun, Aradia is shocked (as expected) to see you there.  
She extends a hand to you anyways, smiling the same slash of a smile she used to have in her round face. You can’t really see, but the texture of her clothes is different and you hear the beat of wings at your back. Eerily comforting in the middle of nowhere and nothing as far as you’re concerned.  
You grasp around a little before she pities you enough to take your flailing hand herself and point you in the right direction as two new fuckers appear out of the verdant nova.  
‘Sup. Karkat and Kanaya have been waiting for you. As for what you want…  
When you’re pushing their meteor off into who-the-fuck-cares, you flip both birds at them, much to Aradia’s joy. She has her own ghost to haunt her now, since she missed out on the sprites.  
\---  
Aradia wakes you up an infinity later and you still can’t see, but you’re with her. Finally.  
Not where you’d like to- somewhere that sounds like the sea and shanties and Vriska and rows over who-the-fuck-cares- but it’s Aradia and it’s some sort of coherent existence and you like it.  
You leave once Vriska and her new friends (Aranea and Meenah and John) get too annoying for you to handle, carting off a spectrally light Feferi and Nepeta with you. They cling to you like wings, and on a private Trollian server you once set up by the Green Sun you type to Aradia that now you’ve a pair of really fucked up wings too.  
\---  
And somewhere else, sort of simultaneously if that holds any meaning whatsoever, you also wake up. To fucking green of all colors and your horns feeling weird and a noose-scarf around your neck.  
Fuck, if the Feferi-and-Nepeta Sollux interspace travel agency thing was real, you really don’t wish that unholy union on anything or anyone including themselves.  
You wish getting fused to Eridan fucking Ampora of all fucking douches less. But you are, because Doom is one fucky glitch, and you’re used to a bifurcated brain by now.  
After enough self-arguing and flipping off a kid who just doesn’t know he has to back the fuck away from you, you agree that you have to apologize, beg and grovel on the fucking floor to the Feferi-Nepeta thing.  
And fend all manners of psychic fucking-ups away from her too. You think that now, it can’t be as tall an order as coexisting with this destructive douche can be.  
\---  
Plus, you have all the time in the world to apologize and take Feferi back to the one brain hill in LOBAF she liked, or treat Aradia to a ruin in the kid’s land. You can apologize and fix stuff now.  
You can actually care for that shit now.  
Huh. Takes one hell of a game.

**Author's Note:**

> A.N. – if I (or anyone) tells you that they/I have any idea what this was all about, they’re lying.  
> Copyright to Andrew Hussie, the weird polygon of relations to whoever coined them first and the attempts at plot to me. Not that anyone would really like that last one.  
> With all that tagged along at the end, hope you enjoyed and so long! Thanks for the read~


End file.
